The biologist gained international fame in the 1990s when his research team nearly outraced the federal government’s effort to map the human genome.

Next, he created the world’s first synthetic organism, setting off a global debate over the ethical boundaries of research.

Now, the La Jolla scientist is planting a $35 million anchor in the heart of this region’s cluster of scientific centers to push his most passionate professional interests — turning microbes into powerful factories capable of cleaning up the environment and producing biofuels, drugs and food.

Venter is one of the world’s top geneticists, known almost as much for his brash personality and big ego as for his work in the laboratory.

Time and again he has challenged conventional wisdom and clashed with fellow scientists, ultimately proving his approach to be right.

The personal fortune Venter amassed from his scientific and business ventures, along with support from major financial backers, allowed him to plot his own course even when government support for his projects was scarce.

“He has always been a maverick in a very good way,” said Larry Goldstein, a leading stem cell researcher at the University of California San Diego and a longtime friend of Venter’s. “He pushes the envelope. He’s not afraid of thinking big.”

The new home being built for the J. Craig Venter Institute on the southwestern corner of the UCSD campus “symbolizes that they have a long-term commitment to being a member of the wonderful research community we have in San Diego,” said Dr. John Reed, chief executive of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla.

Collaborative projects will allow scientists from Sanford-Burnham, The Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute, UCSD and other research centers in and around the Torrey Pines mesa to tap into what Venter says is the defining science of the time.

“When the Salk Institute was built (in the 1960s), it was sort of the peak of changing science in the last century,” he said. “I think we are the equivalent of that for this century.”

Venter’s nonprofit institute and his private company, Synthetic Genomics, are relative newcomers to an area that has been home to world-class research and Nobel laureates for half a century.

The institute opened in 2006 in La Jolla, in rented space just north of UCSD along the western edge of Interstate 5. It was established as a West Coast extension of Venter’s laboratory in Rockville, Md., which served as the biologist’s base in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2005, Venter had launched Synthetic Genomics with his longtime collaborator and Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith to turn the work of his research team into commercial products.

Unlike their Torrey Pines neighbors, whose reputations are built around the work of numerous scientists, Venter’s ventures are immersed in his imposing persona. At the other centers, individual front-line scientists set their own research agendas, Reed said. “The science sort of bubbles up in that environment,” he said.